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Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe - Reality TV Editing

Samusek TDS · 1.7M views · 2007-03-02 · 5:07

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Overview

A clip from Charlie Brooker's BBC show Screenwipe showing how reality TV uses editing to manufacture emotion and narrative. It demonstrates how the same footage can be cut to give very different impressions.

On Hacker News

HN people cite it as a vivid demonstration of how editing shapes perception in documentaries and reality television.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2014–2025

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What people said

superasn · 2021-09 · Strong recommendation

I used to love watching documentaries but the more you watch them the more you see how most often they are biased and edited to show the authors / producers point of view. How a documentary is edited can mean the same facts and interview being used to show something being positive or totally negative. I guess it's true for all media but I've found this especially true for a lot of recent ones I've seen (last was Bikram yoga predator). Btw here is an awesome video that shows how editing can do wonders for how we perceive things(1). Though this one is about reality tv, I've seen the same done in a lot of recent documentaries too. (1) [VIDEO]

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hgomersall · 2025-02 · Recommendation

Most mainstream documentaries are full of fluff. You can generally read the transcript of a half hour programme in a couple of minutes. I thought Charlie Brooker might have a useful segment on it, but all I could find were the not-quite-on-point, but nevertheless excellent two related segments below: [VIDEO] [LINK]

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specialist · 2021-09 · Recommendation

> the more you watch them aka Media literacy. > the more you see how most often they are biased What's the alternative? > ...here is an awesome video that shows how editing can do wonders for how we perceive things ... [VIDEO] That's quite good. Nice point about how better gear enabled the reality TV format. I did some radio and TV stuff as a kid. (A vocational tech program. Student radio, cable public access, job shadowing, "journalism", etc.) Transmuted me into a "Kill your television" type crank. I can't watch "the news" without yelling at the TV. As a counterpoint: Robert X Cringley's NerdTV had the radical notion of sharing all of the source footage. Viewers could watch his edit, highlight reels, and teasers. And then they could also make their own. Sadly, this format hasn't caught on. Anyway. It seems to me that Zoomers will prove to be the most media literate generation. And so therefore the least susceptible to ham-fisted narrative techniques. Certainly compared to Boomers.

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Sources

Video by Samusek TDS, played through YouTube.

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